If you’ve read us before, you know we focus on authors outside of the mainstream covering subject matter you won’t generally find on the best sellers list. In that regard these authors are no different, the stories will challenge you as they cover mental illness, broken relationships, disillusion, murder, substance abuse, the apocalypse and a certain famous physicist with kind eyes.

Don’t be afraid, you’re in good hands. These stories will walk you through challenging times and they won’t shy away from making you feel it. After all, that’s what the business of being human is, a challenge; but they also never let you forget that behind all of this turmoil is a glimpse of hope.

Just like a broken skyline.

Again, thank you for reading, if you like it, please consider leaving a review on whatever site you purchased the book. Those reviews help us and our authors continue to do what we do.

Exhibits houses an eclectic group of characters featuring drug addicts, Gods, and fallen rock stars inhabiting the same space. There’s bedbugs, S&M, and a shape shifting dinosaur. There’s excess and poverty, love and hate, and a well-meaning apocalypse for good measure.

Though it’s a disparate group of stories, they are all parts of the great human drama we live every day. Their insecurities, guilt and fears are our own magnified by their circumstances. Most of us live lives of quiet desperation, happy to make it through another day still breathing. These story tellers and their tales do not, they put every intense surreal moment out on display for all of us to see.

]]>Taking Down the Moon – Purchase today on Amazon!http://67press.com/taking-down-the-moon-purchase-today-on-amazon/
Fri, 06 May 2016 14:54:22 +0000http://pr67pressesat.wpengine.com/?p=299Click here to purchase Taking Down the Moon!

In Taking Down the Moon, Lisa Muir has gathered an eccentric cast of characters – animals, beauty queens and community college teachers just to name a few – and placed them in such far flung places as Nevada’s Valley of Fire, New Zealand and the western mountains of North Carolina.

At first, the stories appear to be straightforward, but we quickly learn nothing in Muir’s world is ever as it seems. With What Remains, a grieving widow finds closure in her husband’s secret life, taking a familiar plot to an altogether different territory. You Can’t Collect Time tells the unusual tale of a young woman, her suitor, her birds and her transformation. Each story weaves its own tale of discovery, loss and independence, surprising the reader along the way.

Both whimsical and unsettling, Taking Down the Moon‘s absurd, rustic and surreal stories illuminate the magical quality of the most ordinary moments.

As with The Salmagundi, we made no requirements for theme or content. Unlike The Salmagundi, a theme quickly emerged from the stories we received. We wondered if there was something about 2014 that inspired such particular strife, but the more we thought about it, and the more we read we realized we were witness to the basic building blocks of the human condition: our relationships with each other.

Affinity has many definitions; its most common usage is “a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something.” It’s describing our attraction, be it to an object or person. The very basis of how we start our relationships. I like that, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, not of our relationships, or the word itself. It’s a start, it’s just not complete.

The chemist Joseph Mellor described chemical affinity as “the driving force of a chemical reaction.” Now we’re getting somewhere. The Driving Force. I believe this is what we talk about when we talk about the big human chemical reaction: love. It’s what pulls us together and allows us to react with another person. It’s the reaction we tend to focus on, but it’s the affinity that got us there in the first place and it’s what brings us back – for good, bad or ugly.

The 17 stories you hold in your hands explore the nature of our driving forces. The results are sometimes explosive, sometimes magical and always intense. And like any memorable relationship, these stories will leave a mark.

67 Press is pleased to announce the publication of Another Form of Prayer, by Jeffrey Sykes.

Haunted by the ghosts of his past, Samuel Ashton spends his days denying credit applications and his nights at the corner bar looking for somewhere to fit in. While he finds plenty of company in the form of one substance or another, it does little to fend off the loneliness. As winter settles in, Ashton struggles to raise himself from the margins, only to see his decisions force him deeper down a path most of us would never travel.

With Another Form of Prayer, Jeffrey Sykes delivers us into a world of despair and self-torment as we follow Samuel’s attempts to find an anchor for his swiftly fleeing soul.

I visited Greece in 1999. A couple of weeks prior to leaving I received a package from my mother with a hand written note and a journal. She expressed excitement for her oldest son heading off to Europe. She wanted me to chronicle the trip in the journal. I thought it was a sweet gesture from someone who had always wanted me to embrace my creative side. I returned from the trip with great memories and an empty journal.

A few years back, I received a beautiful leather bound journal from my wife for Christmas. Before I had completely unwrapped the gift my wife joyously exclaimed, “You should write something!” The same thing occurred the following Christmas. That time around she simply said, “You really need to begin writing.” Two years passed and both journals remained unopened on my bedside night stand.

Lack of confidence, fear, or the inability to just take some time and begin something all played a factor in my hesitancy. Then, sometime in the summer of 2011, I said fuck it, opened the journal and laid pen to paper.

I often find myself in conversations about books while in social settings. Without fail, the discussion segues into an original idea of their own they wish to someday write. Whether it’s a novel, short story, or opinion piece, the ideas surfacing from the people I run into around town excite me. “You should definitely begin writing on that” I tell them. The same conversations happen repeatedly. Nothing comes from it.

Why did Alan and I start 67 Press? We want to take that idea from inside your brain and turn it into a finished product. You have it in you and just maybe 67 Press can push down a barrier or two and bring it out into the light of day. My mom and wife did it for me; we’d like to do it for you.

Alan Wright

It started like a lot of ideas do, barely formed and hardly there, buried among the minutiae of everyday thoughts, not much more than an itch. That idea, that itch, was put there by a particularly zealous student teacher in my tenth grade English class. She believed we all had poetry inside us; we just needed someone to help us get it out.

It started with a spiral notebook. It was supposed to be for one of my college freshman year classes, but instead of taking notes, I scribbled ideas and pieces of thoughts. I created characters and scenes and snippets of dialogue. I listened to the sighs and coughing and whispers of my classmates, and I wrote them down. But more importantly, I used a page of that notebook to write one sentence, “I want to be a writer.”

What that one simple sentence has meant to me over the years has changed and evolved with me over time. I’ve filled more notebooks; I’ve written copy for everything from foot diseases to mosquito repellent. I’ve blogged, I’ve edited and I’ve continued to furiously scribble words in an effort to find meaning in what we do, living our life.

It started with a teacher, a notebook and a few ideas. It started with my very basic need to connect. It started when I realized I wanted nothing more than to have someone read what I write and have it mean something to them. It started when I stopped caring about failure.

Now it starts with you. We’re a lot like my tenth grade English teacher. We believe you have it inside you; someone just needs to help you get it out. We’d like to be the ones to help you do it. Take a chance and send us your work, we might not sign you, but we respond to anyone with enough courage to send us what they write. We’ll give you honest feedback and maybe even take you out for a beer.

It’s 20 tales of desperation and decadence told through the eyes of characters on the edge. The stories careen between right and wrong as they navigate through love and death and everything in between.

It’s where tales of murder, hookers, bar fights and Holly Go Lightly wannabes keep pace with stories about familial loss, suicide, coming of age and the after effects of war (a zombie war, but a war none the less).

Invoking Barthelme, Thompson and Carver, the writing is experimental and unflinching with a surreal sense of humor. The Salmagundi is playful and disturbing, diverse and entertaining – it’s perfect for reading on the beach or while waiting to get your mom out of jail!

Help that talent work within their vision to create a finished product

Act in the best interest of the author, not bottom lines or focus groups

Allow these writers voices to be heard

Why should you work with us?

We stand by our principles and we stand by you. We’ll do more than put your work into the hands of others. We’ll collaborate, instigate, inspire and drive you to your full potential.

Why should you work with us?

We’re small, we’re focused and we aren’t trying to take over the world. Our goal isn’t to publish more books than anyone else. We only work with a small number of authors at any given time, ensuring you get the attention necessary to be successful.

]]>How to Write a Great Query Letterhttp://67press.com/how-to-write-a-great-query-letter/
Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:14:01 +0000http://pr67pressesat.wpengine.com/?p=157When we started 67 Press, we did so because we love great writing. We see ourselves as a collective, not a company. We want to work with authors to help them realize their vision, to help them create art. This may seem antiquated in our current times, where souls are traded for plastic every day and a life worth living is measured in pounds of consumerism, but to us; it’s all that matters.

Our intention is not, and will never be, to find authors who write “great query letters”. We don’t reread the authors we love because they learned how to write a query. We love them because they wrote great stories. We want you to do the same, focus on writing great stories, creating great characters, and knocking your readers socks off every day. Leave the query letters to the other guys, if you’re interested in working with us, send us your story. We do want you to include a little something about yourself, but don’t send us a query letter, it’s a waste of your time – we’re not going to read them.